bits from the braai

Sheena was arrested for overcharging on...roses.

"The supplier had put them up. I wasn't going to make a loss, was I? But the inspectors came round and said I shouldn't have put my prices up."

"They put me in cells. It was filthy. You couldn't even put your head back: the walls were covered in black slime."

She spent half a day there before her husband came to bail her out.

"The police said to him: Take her, take her. She's a cheeky madam, that one."

....

Elias' birth certificate gives his D.O.B as 1948. In fact, this Classics professor was born in 1942. He went to school six years late, aged 12.

He spent most of his childhood herding cows and goats near the Runde River.

"We were coming back late, one day. I was with Edwin, my small cousin-brother. This snake appeared, a python, big as an anaconda. It took the goat before Edwin."

The villagers turned out en masse -- including Edwin's mother -- and beat it to a pulp.

Elias' parents had never registered his birth, and he needed a birth certificate to get into school. So he took himself to the District Office -- and knocked six years off his age.

...

C. T, in his early 20s, is due for a finger amputation today or tomorrow. Dr Cut-Cut (that's how most people refer to the local surgeon) warned last week he'd lose his whole arm.

He put his finger into the grill of the swimming pool at home and got bitten by a Biberon burrowing adder.

"It was probably looking for frogs," says my MIL with a shudder. The Snakes of Rhodesia book says burrowing adders -- which look deceptively like harmless brown house snakes -- are most often seen in the rainy season when chasing their prey. "Inquisitive children" are frequent victims.

"His flesh has gone all rotten," she says. "And his poor mother is off caring in England."